An audit of Colorado’s parole operations is being expanded to review whether budget issues are keeping parole officers from placing some high-risk parolees under intensive, electronic-monitoring supervision.

On Wednesday, Tim Hand, the state’s director of parole, was put on a paid leave of absence. Hand has not returned telephone calls seeking comment. Morgan declined to discuss the reasons he had been placed on leave.

In an interview in April with The Denver Post, Hand spoke of the challenges of monitoring parolees on intensive supervision.

“We’re in a situation where you manage people closely when they first come out, but 800 new people are coming out of prison every month, and you have to put new groups on high risk,” Hand said.

But he later said budget issues are not a factor in determining who is monitored electronically.

Documents obtained by The Post through an open-records request show that the state has in some cases been unable to place or keep parolees under intensive supervision, which requires electronic monitoring and extra scrutiny, because of “caps” or budgetary limitations on the program.

In one of those cases, a parolee who was an alleged American Nazi Party recruit went on to kill a woman in Colorado Springs. In another, a parolee killed a 79-year-old woman in her Weld County home during an attempted burglary.

Morgan said the audit by the NIC, an agency within the U.S. Justice Department, will probe whether parole officers are properly classifying the risk that parolees pose to the public.

“Are officers making decisions based on gut reactions or are their decisions based on sound, evidence-based practices?” Morgan asked. “We don’t know the answers right now.”

Morgan said the parole division always has had a cap in place for the number of intensive-supervision parolees, but the cap isn’t necessarily driven by budget issues. She said the cap relates to the percentage of parole cases that can be designated as intensive supervision.

“We’re not certain we have a budget problem,” Morgan said. “But at the end of the audit, we may find we have a budget problem.”

Another issue the audit will review is staff training. In an interview last week, Werholtz said he worries that parole officers aren’t receiving enough. While parole officers receive sufficient firearms training, they may not be adequately trained in risk-assessment tools and interview techniques they need, he said.

Werholtz added that the state should do a better job of assessing the quality of interactions a parole officer has with a parolee and not just the quantity of those interactions.

“What we need to start examining is the nature of that interaction and make it real clear to our folks what we want the content of that interaction to be and how you structure it and how you build working relationships with the offender,” Werholtz said. “That is difficult because we are asking our staff to take both an enforcement role as well as a helping role.”

On March 14, parolee Evan Ebel slipped off his ankle monitoring bracelet, and three days later fatally shot Denver pizza delivery driver Nathan Leon, authorities believe. He then killed Clements at his home on March 19, authorities say.

It took five days after Ebel removed the bracelet for his parole officer to visit his Commerce City home and six days for a warrant to be issued for his arrest. He was fatally wounded in a shootout with Texas officials on March 21.

Colorado corrections officials plan to ask legislative leaders for extra money to finance the hiring of as many as 12 new parole officers to track down parolees who have fled supervision, Morgan said Thursday.

Preliminary budget discussions indicate that corrections officials plan to formally ask the Joint Budget Committee, which sets budget priorities for the legislature, for at least $600,000 annually to finance the new parole unit that would track down absconders. In the past, absconder roundups have been done on an ad hoc basis using overtime payments to parole officers, with the assistance of local law enforcement.

At least two homicide cases involve parolees who weren’t on intensive supervision, though they had been designated for that level of oversight.

Kandin Wilson fatally shot Susana Pelayo-Perez on Sept. 27, 2009, while she was the passenger in her boyfriend’s car in a Colorado Springs lot.

He had four prior convictions, including those for theft and trespass. He never had a disciplinary action against him while in prison and was granted discretionary parole on Aug. 3, 2009. Records show he was not placed on intensive-supervision parole upon his release because of “program caps.”

In the case of Terry Sanchez, who was released on discretionary parole in 2003 after serving 11 years for burglary, the state parole board removed him from intensive supervision in April 2004 “due to budgetary limitations,” according to DOC documents.

While Sanchez was in the program, he complied with all its conditions, the documents say. He went on to fatally cut the throat of a woman in her Weld County farmhouse.

Morgan said that during the time of the Sanchez case, the parole division took significant budget cuts, which were detailed to the legislature, and began monitoring fewer parolees. Those supervision limits were later supposed to have been lifted, but the audit is reviewing whether budget issues continue to affect supervision levels, she said.

Hand requested the audit of the state’s parole operations in April. He asked the NIC to evaluate technologies to determine whether databases parole officers use are “complicating an officer’s ability to adequately perform the job duties.”

The audit will review electronic monitoring systems to see whether parole officers are properly responding to alerts and whether those systems are adequately monitoring sex offenders, gang offenders and high-risk offenders. Hand also asked for a comparison between Colorado and national averages on home visits and face-to-face contacts by parole officers, overall responses to electronic-monitoring alerts and confiscation of weapons and drugs by parole officers.

The audit will review the parole division’s quality assurance systems, policies, training and data collections in addition to other issues. Werholtz said the audit will shape parole operations for years.

“Everything is on the table,” Werholtz said. “It’s going to be hard, and it’s going to be painful, but we need to be willing to take a look at everything and listen to all the criticism and figure out which of the pieces are valid and which aren’t and address those.”

Christopher N. Osher can be contacted at cosher@denverpost.com or 303-954-1747 or @chrisosher. Chris is a reporter on the investigation team at The Denver Post who has covered law enforcement, judicial and regulatory issues for the newspaper. He also has reported from war zones in Africa.

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